Energy is an example of a resource on which a planning of activities on-board a vehicle is highly dependent. Terrestrial, nautical and aerial vehicles powered with one or more fuel engines have been equipped almost from the start with gauges to display to their driver or pilot an indication of the level of fuel in the tank(s), for example. Making sure that the vehicle had enough fuel to execute its travel plan was left to the driver/pilot. Of course, this task is notable for aircraft because in-flight refueling is currently limited to bombers or combat aircraft. Information on flight time/distance authorized with available fuel (i.e. endurance or autonomy) has long been provided to pilots on the dashboard or the cockpit display unit. The prediction is not too difficult for commercial airliners for which the route and flight parameters do not undergo a lot of variations, except from meteorological conditions, which can be predicted as well, at least in the short term.
The technology is also available on automotive vehicles, although an accurate prediction of the range that a vehicle will be capable of travelling on a route is more difficult because instantaneous, or essentially instantaneous, energy consumption will be heavily dependent notably upon the profile of the road to be travelled, the traffic conditions and the driving style, among other issues.
Being capable of providing reliable endurance predictions to a driver of an automobile has become a much more important issue when the automobile is powered, in whole or in part, by an electrical engine. This is because the autonomy of these vehicles is still rather low, as is the density of recharging stations, while the time needed for recharge is quite high. Solutions to this class of problem have been thought of, notably by using the information available from the car navigation system. An example of such a solution is disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 8,594,918. However the system disclosed by this document does not allow a driver to easily plan a travel with a plurality of activities, which may be more or less critical or of a higher or lower priority, and to execute ‘what if’ simulations to be able to make the best informed decision on the optimum allowable travel plan, either at the preparation stage or en-route.
Also, electric aircraft are now developed, and energy management becomes more safety critical, while the pilots will still be overwhelmed by the existing safety parameters. In the avionics field, it also therefore becomes all the more important to change the paradigm of energy management and make it more activity based, so that a pilot can easily determine the activities that he or she can decide to safely perform in his/her flight plan within the remaining autonomy of the aircraft.
European patent application no 15/305914 assigned to the same applicant provides a solution to this problem. The current invention solves further relevant issues, notably in view of variations of external factors.